Tag Archives: new york subways

Nietzsche, Power, and Bible-readers on the Subway

Last evening, after a full day of work teaching Philosophy of Biology, a seminar on Nietzsche, and conducting a teaching observation of a graduate fellow, I left campus for my evening weightlifting session. I was feeling run down, and not a hundred percent. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep, perhaps a nagging cluster of cold-sore throat related symptoms that were insidiously undermining my ability to face up to the world. As I rode the subway to the gym, I felt uninspired and sleepy; the book I had intended to read only had a few of its pages turned.

Thankfully, the lifting went well. I was scheduled to back squat (Crossfit South Brooklyn is following the Wendler Cycle for our strength programming), and after lifting 185×5, and 205×5, I did my maximum-repetitions set at 230 (for 12 reps). By the end of it, my legs were shaking, I was close to hyperventilating, and a clarity-inducing  surge of euphoria had seemingly cleansed me of the sluggishness of the afternoon.

I changed, and made my way to the 7th Avenue subway station to head home. As I waited for the train, I pulled out my copy of Karl Jasper‘s Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of his Philosophical Activity (JHU Press, 1997) , and, somehow emboldened, began to read:

The pyschology of the feeling to power: Nietzsche’s conception of the ‘will to power’ is by no means identical with his conception of the drives that aim to provide a feeling of power. The one relates to genuine being that has become extra-empirical; the other to observable psychological experience. The one involves an abstract will, intent upon determining the course of its own being; the other, the conscious pursuit of the enjoyment attending the feeling of power.

I stared back at the page. Really, was this where I had left off, and now, resumed reading?

As I sat on the bench, a lady on her way back home sat down next to me and opened up a book. It was the Bible. She opened it to Numbers 25, and began reading. I sat there for a few seconds, and then, unable to resist, spoke: “Excuse me, are you reading the Bible straight through or picking selections?” The lady smiled, and said, “I’m reading it straight through.” I then asked, “Have you read the Bible before?” She smiled again, and said, “No, I’ve read it many times before.  This time my reading has been a bit slower; I got bogged down in Leviticus for a bit.” I nodded; sometimes I too, get mired in parts of books I read.

A B train pulled in and discharged its passengers, who swarmed around us to head for the exits, as we sat there with our books open on our laps. I wondered if my new acquaintance would ask me about what I was reading, and how I would describe it if she hadn’t heard of Nietzsche. She then spoke again, “Are you a believer?” I replied, “No, but I’m always curious about people that appear to be serious readers.” Her reply was made inaudible by the arrival of the Q train. I bade her take care as I headed for a subway car.

I wonder what Nietzsche would have thought about it all: a hundred years after his death, philosophy professors, on their way home after weightlifting, reading books about his writings, sitting next to readers of the Bible, all the while ensconced in the bowels of a gigantic subterranean transportation system in an American city.

Random Searches on the New York Subways: Getting Used to the Stop-n-Frisk

New York City residents are, by now, used to the subway version of the stop-and-frisk, to the sight of policemen manning the turnstiles to the city subway, subjecting passengers to ‘random’ searches of their bags and belongings. The rules are quite simple: if you don’t subject yourselves to the search you don’t get to enter and ride. Many of the city’s residents, however, do not realize the option to refuse the search exists. (I have never looked closely enough to verify whether this option is made clear to the potential passenger; rather, the subway rider becomes aware of the impending search when a policeman menacingly waves you toward his partners with the irritatingly faux-polite “Sir, would you step this way?”)

Over the past few years, in the course of teaching the privacy portions of my Computer Ethics class at Brooklyn College, I became aware of a rather depressing fact when discussing the Fourth Amendment: not a single student in my classes was aware of the fact that they could decline a search and simply leave the subway station instead. When I informed them that on two separate occasions–once at 42nd Street station and once at Atlantic Avenue–I had said, “No thanks” and walked out–on the latter occasion, I walked up the stairs, crossed Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues and then entered the same station at the unmanned Hanson Place entrance–I was greeted with cries of disbelief: “Really?” “No way! You can do that?”

This little discussion is quite useful in enabling a segue into a discussion of the ludicrous rallying cry–If You’ve Got Nothing to Hide, You Shouldn’t Mind a Little Stop-n-Frisk Action–of the pro-search brigade. I ask my students whether concealment of a crime is the only reason that someone might give for refusing a search, and ask them to suggest situations where someone might quite reasonably decline a search in order to keep something entirely legal private. (Unsurprisingly, some of the examples involved pornography: one student suggested a closeted gay man going home with recently purchased gay porn; another student said he wouldn’t want his hetero-porn purchases to be visible to other passengers; others disliked the idea of police looking through their clothes; and some students, because of their own personal history of encounters with the police, simply disliked the idea of police, once again, subjecting them to an atmosphere of intimidation.) Many of my students quite like the sound of a great line I got from Marc Rotenberg: If I’ve Got Nothing to Hide, Then Why Do You Need to Search Me?

During this discussion, I also ask my students what they think is being achieved by these random searches in the subway system. As my example of entry and re-entry to the Atlantic Avenue station suggested, the system is easily co-opted (when I declined my search at the 42nd Street station, I walked eight blocks and entered the subway at 34th Street); moreover, someone actually planning to do harm to the city subways would not plan an operation that could preempted by a mere search at the turnstiles. The answer to this question emerges quite quickly: this system of searches does nothing to increase our security; it does however, ensure that the citizens of this city (and certainly those who visit it), increasingly get used to a world in which armed representatives of the state are present in public spaces, ready to inspect, regulate, and commandeer. Gradual conditioning like this can do wonders to ensure the steady, relentless erosion–one enabled by the acquiescence of the citizenry–of legally sanctioned and protected civil liberties. These searches are not tactics of protection; they are strategies of subversion.

An “Intellectual Property” Lesson From A Busker

On Saturday morning, as I sat at 7th Avenue subway station in Brooklyn, waiting for a Q train to take me back home, I noticed a banjo player playing across the tracks from me on the Manhattan-bound platform. The station was noisy as usual, but still, somehow, his urgent strumming and foot stomping (on a percussion device I cannot name) managed to catch my attention. The banjo was insistent and perky, and the beat provided by the foot-drum (there you go, I named it myself), combined with it to produce an oddly compelling rhythm. As befitting a subway busker, his instrument case sat open next to him, awaiting small change and rumpled bills. I thought of making a contribution, and sighed, “If only I wasn’t going the wrong way; I’d have given him some cash; I’ve got a train to catch.” And then, bizarrely, another voice spoke: “Fool! You’ve blathered on so much about voluntary contributions underwriting new economic paradigms for supporting artists in a world free of onerous “intellectual property” regimes, and you won’t cross the tracks to stick a bill in a busking bowl?”

So I got up, checked to see if a train was coming, ran up the stairs, across the divider, down the stairs, up to a startled banjo player, threw in a dollar bill (there seemed to be a few more of them in there), and ran back up the stairs back to my platform. The homeward-bound Q train pulled in, and a dollar poorer, I headed home.